Under The Mallee Bough

  The Nesting Tree. The Nesting Tree. Come, friends, listeners, gather 'round me, Together we shall hear of the story I plead, Turn life’s pages with its entrancing scenes, Witness the unfolding of one’s living deeds, And tell you I shall, the story of “The Nesting Tree”. * At the back of the old settler’s hut, there you will see, An old, so very old, gnarled branched mallee tree. It’s central trunk long dead, smoothed and grey, Time’s caress removed rough bark and did sand, All sharp edges from that tall, trunk so grand. * There is a hollow up a dozen feet from the bole, Just to the left of a greying spar, bone sculp’d, That give nesting shelter every year to galahs. Their red and grey colours matched as a pair, Returning season on season to raise chicks there. * Now, every summer of the last twenty five, The same pair made that nesting tree their hide, Come back every year, for t...

  Ted and Edie dance the Rumba.   “I saw it happen an’ that’s how I knows it…and I know why it happened..an’ I’m sorry it didn’t happen a long time ago, back when they could’ve made something with it.” Swertzy took a drag on his cigarette again and settled into the chair outside the Sedan Post Office and reflected on times past..his portly frame shifted to ease the rheumatic pain in his hip. Heinie Schwertzferger explained.. “Ted and I first learned proper dancing with old Mrs Harris, who used to give dance classes in her home back in the fifties..over there in Towitta..when Ted and I were young blades..She would move the lounge table to one side and crank up the old gramophone player and she and her hubby would teach a group of us locals how to dance real proper like…you know..the Fox-trot, Military Two Step…those old ballroom dances of the day..” “ A few of us young blokes went there because there was a lot of old-style dances in those day...

Slow cooking in a “Black Kitchen”. You got to get up ..pri-tty erley in da mornin’..to stoke up the German vault oven in the old “black kitchen” if you want to get a good day’s preparation and cooking in before the roast lamb (w/rosemary) is just at an itch and a scratch to be taken out from the back of the oven and generously sliced and served with the pratties and peas for dinner… This old settler’s cottage we bought from a German Aunty (through marriage) out here in the Mallee, was a fine example of the “settler’s layout” for farmhouse and black kitchen… “ A distinguishing feature of the German house is its high roof, below which the ‘protective’ attic was often used as a sleeping, working and storage place. Cultural ties associated with the roof were still evident in these early Australian German communities. Thus it was considered a bad omen for women in the later stages of their pregnancies to leave the protection of their roofs (once someone was u...

The passing of the amateur. If I consult this little pencilled in book of a shopping bill from a Mr. D. Lambert & Son, general store and victuals supplier of Towitta, for the fortnight in February 1936, I see that a packet of Yo-Yo biscuits was a mere 7 pence, and while the entire shopping for that bill was a total of 1/14/7 (one pound fourteen shillings and seven pence) there was deducted for 4 dozen eggs and 6 pounds of butter as barter for a total of 9 /6 pence taken off the bill….and then Mr. Lambert would continue on his way in his horse and sulky delivery wagon to the next family farm to repeat the procedure…a round trip he did once a fortnight to deliver the grocery list and pick up bartered exchanged produce. A congenial and fruitful arrangement of the times. These casual trades between shop-keeper and households were common fare in the times…there is also record of an Indian dry-goods trader used to do the rounds, selling or trading cloth an...

  Joyce Delivers the Flowers. “Joyce Hartingdale .. Secretary” the writing on the triangular wedge of wood prominent at the front of her desk was written in bright, gold paint. It was there the first day she came to the job at the office situated at the front of the “Shoebridge Furniture Factory”. A job she had come all the way from Manchester, England for…well…it was not just the job, but she had applied for the secretarial job while home in England, fresh graduated from the secretarial college where she had seen the advertisement seeking young ladies to come to the Australian colonies for a bright, fresh life…or at least that is how Joyce saw it… and she took it. The telegram from her mother back in Manchester sat on the passenger’s seat of the Morris Minor 1000 sedan she was at that very moment driving out to the country town of Kanmantoo so as to attend the funeral of an obscure uncle who had just passed away. “ Uncle Stan has died”. The telegr...

  A Quiet Little Corner of the World.   A  respectable tradesman I have known for many years told me of when he was a young blade, he and some friends rented a flat above a funeral director’s office and “workshop”. If they were busy and short-handed, they would call on him for some work. He didn’t mind as it helped pay the rent. In the early days the old hands would play jokes on him, with a sort of “black humour”. But sometimes he was roped into the more mundane activities of the industry. He told me of this little “event”…of course, I have taken the usual liberties with the story-line. It went like this: A Quiet Little Corner of the World. The van slowed momentarily in the driveway as Andy and Sam waited for the roller-door to open. A large sign embossed in black on the right hand side of the door said “TIMOTHY & SON Funeral Directors.” Sam pulled the van up inside the cavernous building. They had just opened the back door and were...

  The end of stories. I can remember exactly when that feeling came over me that here was one of those moments when, through some “native intuition”, you can feel that it is the ending of an era…a passing of a moment in time when something important is being lost… I was at my aged mother’s house doing some regular maintenance..I am a carpenter and her house, built by my Italian father just after the second world war, was a hotch-potch of scrounged materials and added-on-as-needed rooms that now, some sixty years later was a veritable endless loop of patch-up and maintain. My mother was quite old at the time…she is deceased now..and I was there having a small lunch after doing the jobs..and it was at the moment when I was spreading some honey on a bit of toast that I remembered something.. “Mum….do you remember telling us about that old chap back there in your Mallee days, who used to raid those honey-bee hives in the hollowed trees and he had a bi...